I was 11 years old. It was my first week of middle school, and I was enjoying lunch with some of my friends. I can still remember another sixth-grade girl – a girl I barely ever spoke to – approaching the table and telling us, with the casual air of a child who did not fully grasp the severity of the situation, what her band teacher had just told her class. Two planes had just flown into the World Trade Center.

Looking back, I consider that encounter at the lunch table the final moment of my childhood. It was the first time I realized what horrific evil existed in the world.

And now, nine years later, my perspective on September 11th has certainly evolved. At 11 years old I didn’t fully understand what had happened. I just knew that it was terrible, mostly from watching the reactions of the adults in my life. At 20 years old, I understand the events of that day all too well, and my heart breaks for all the innocent lives that were taken and for their family and friends.

However, one perspective I gained from that day has not changed in nine years, and that’s the notion that evil is truly present in the world. And I’m not just talking about the terrorists. I’m talking about the rescue workers who were at ground zero – firefighters, police officers, construction workers, etc. – who are now collectively suing the American government for millions of dollars in compensation for supposed injuries and health problems.

Before you label me as unappreciative or un-American, let me say that my dad is a retired sergeant for the New York Police Department. He was on duty on September 11th, and was stationed just a couple of blocks away when the second tower came down, covering him from head to foot in debris. Afterwards, he spent months at ground zero helping with the clean-up and recovery efforts.

He informed me that after 9/11, lawyers mailed forms to every ground zero worker they could reach. The only requirement was to list any injuries you have, sign on the dotted line, and mail the form back to receive cash from the government.

What ground zero workers decided to do with these forms distinguished the heroes from the scam artists. Only a handful of people, including my dad, ripped up the forms and threw them in the garbage. They felt they did their jobs on 9/11, and did not want a payout for it. These workers are the true heroes. The majority of workers, however, jumped on the bandwagon in pursuit of money. They listed injury after injury on the form, knowing that they were pre-existing and/or not caused by ground zero.

The legal battle started in 2003 and still drags on today. In total, 10,000 responders sued New York City, claiming a staggering 350 diseases, according to Anthony DePalma, who was a reporter and foreign correspondent at the New York Times for 22 years, and wrote “City of Dust” about the health effects of September 11th.

If you monitored any large group of people for a length of time, it is highly probable that a certain number of them would naturally develop different forms of cancer, heart problems, breathing problems, etc. This is the case with the thousands of ground zero workers. The fact that 350 different diseases were reported suggests that the diseases are random and occurred naturally.

It would be a different story if after September 11th, hundreds or thousands of ground zero workers were all suffering from one or two certain health problems/diseases. This would suggest a definite link between ground zero debris and health effects.

But a scientific link has still never been proven between the two. So why are these workers being awarded money when there is no sufficient evidence to support their case? This is largely the result of these workers and their attorneys scamming the judicial system. 

“…The federal government put up $1 billion to create a special insurance company with just one client, the city of New York. The $1 billion acted as a red flag for plaintiffs’ attorneys, who went around collecting as many responders as possible to sue the city,” continued DePalma. “Their strategy was to overwhelm the court with plaintiffs, hoping to force a settlement and avoid the messy necessity of proving any linkage [between ground zero debris and illnesses] in court.”

With the help of many of the ground zero workers, lawyers have pulled off one of the biggest scams in American history, capitalizing off of a day when thousands of innocent Americans were murdered.

Plaintiff lawyers have pocketed over $150 million for themselves, while defense lawyers for the city of New York have pocketed $200 million, according to John Stossel of FOX Business and FOX News. And the workers claiming injuries have been collectively awarded hundreds of millions of dollars.

It is unbelievable that for a country facing such economic hardship, virtually nobody is questioning the ethics of these workers and lawyers who are collecting billions of dollars.

There are myriad of reasons for this, one of the biggest and consequently most dangerous, is people blindly following the tide of popular opinion. Many people are proclaiming everyone who was at ground zero heroes without thinking, and due to human nature, hardly anyone wants to go against this popular notion. People are afraid to ask questions at the risk of being denounced by the majority.

It doesn’t help that the media is largely biased, printing front page stories about supposedly sick ground zero workers, accompanied by convincing photos. They are not presenting the other side of the story (the notion that these people might in fact be scamming the government) because they don’t want to go against the tide of popular opinion and upset readers/customers. Thus, the media is failing to do its job in being fair and balanced, asking questions, and acting as the fourth estate and watchdog of public interest. 

People need to start thinking for themselves and not believing everything they hear and read in the media.

The public needs to decide who the real heroes of September 11th are, because many were certainly present that day. But they are not the ground zero workers presented in the media unjustly suing the government for millions of dollars.

The heroes took the form of the business man on the 60th floor of one of the towers who carried a woman in a wheelchair down every flight, the civilians who comforted each other in a time of terror, and the brave police officers and firefighters who expect nothing in return from their work that day but the satisfaction of knowing they did their jobs and helped a lot of people in a time of crisis.

 

To contact The Ionian’s Lauren Urban, e-mail her at [email protected]